Opinion

I am troubled by indecency. God knows at the Guardian offices I'm surrounded by it; but it is not the antics of the MediaGuardian team to which I refer. Last week, the lovely Nicollette Sheridan bared her back in the middle of an American football match. Not by accident or anything, it was part of a trailer for the ABC series Desperate Housewives, which sounds like a sort of updated Dallas but with homemakers instead of oil barons. A drama about four women in a suburban cul-de-sac who have a lot of sex? What a shame there's no home on British television for a show like that. I'm joking, of course. Channel 4 will be screening it as soon as the tapes cross the Atlantic.

Anyway. The point is that Sheridan made a trailer for her hit series (21 million viewers) in which she drops the towel in which she is clad, and an American footballer is both surprised and delighted by the front view. The football match-watching viewer sees only her bare back.

Michael Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, clearly has a habit of watching gridiron with an easily-distressed relative. After fining CBS $550,000 for a glimpse of Janet Jackson's nipple during half-time at the Super Bowl, Powell announced this week that he was "very disappointed" in ABC for the Desperate Housewives malarkey. He refused to rule out taking up the offensive broadcast as a legal matter. ABC has apologised to its viewers, to the NFL and presumably to Powell's gran in an attempt to escape another record fine for indecency, but in the meantime is being slated by everyone from the Family Research Council to, well, lots of other organisations with the word family or American in their title.

Actually, the Family Research Council thinks ABC should be fined for a whole other programming faux pas. What really riled the conservative lobbying group was the screening of Saving Private Ryan a couple of weeks ago. A swear word seems to have slipped through uncensored into the broadcast and the senior legal adviser to the council - worryingly that title seems to imply it has more than one legal adviser - is pressuring Powell to crack down on the screening of films that convey the mindless violence of war through the medium of four-letter words.

Meanwhile, in radio, Howard Stern has appeared on the David Letterman show explaining his decision to abandon free radio in favour of the subscription satellite service Sirius. Before we get carried away, let's remember that king among those reasons is, of course, the $500m across five years he is being paid to take his brand of indecency out of the FCC's way and drive listeners to pay $12.95 a month.

Nonetheless Stern, though undoubtedly from the lads'-mag school of broadcasting, has a point when he claims that his show hasn't changed much over the past 20 years but now he's racking up $1.75m worth of indecency fines and being dropped from the syndication market because of his refusal to back George Bush.

So far, this is the continuing march of the new puritanism overtaking the US media. But then last week up popped Mel Karmazin, the man who last year threatened to buy ITV for Viacom, which he was then running. Karmazin made millions and built a radio company big enough to buy CBS. In fact, Karmazin's star performer while building one of the biggest radio networks in the US was Stern, but it was not championing free speech that prompted Mel to back Howard, it was sheer numbers. As he points out, you can't broadcast to 18 to 34-year-olds without talking about sex.

And when Karmazin announced that his next job will be as Stern's boss again, as chief executive of Sirius, two swallows threatened to become a summer. The more Karmazin and Stern can whip up a frenzy over the new puritanism of the US right, the more likely the rest of the US are to pay $12.95 a month for a satellite radio service. The more the networks run scared of bad language and nudity, the better the case HBO and Showtime can make for subscription programming.

Karmazin's entry into this battleground of taste and decency means just one thing: this is not about freedom or censorship or quality broadcasting, this is about money. In just the same way that Rupert Murdoch took sport and made a premium service out of a market that never before existed, Karmazin will take indecency and make it a premium product. It's genius really. The further to the right the mainstream moves, the more money the profiteering profanity merchants can make.

And won't that just send the FCC into a frenzy? OK Mr Powell, you can have ABC, your gran and the family values council or whoever; we'll take the swearing, the nudity, the adult themes, the politics and the 18-to-34s to pay networks and we'll make an absolute fortune. Enough to pay the fines, anyway.